Tuesday, September 22, 2015

The dominant discourse in gender campaigns

Development has always produced a bitter sweet and contradictory feeling in me. I always wanted to work in the field because I felt that if I had to choose something to do with my life I would rather choose something that would contribute to social change or the improvement of people’s life. I finally happened to start working with United Nations at the age of 23. Apart from the obvious links between development and colonial and postcolonial tradition, I had never thought about the different discourses of development. But there was a turn around when I first got in contact with the theory.

Once I learnt about the modernization, the dependency theory and most recently “participatory” and “empowering” approaches to development, I started to see development programming and practice with critical lenses. I started to link that many development policies towards the Global South were biased and constructed according to some principles that sometimes were not necessarily inclined to contribute to social change or transformation. I also came to know that the majority of the constructions of the Global South had been done by people coming from the North, and that the development “apparatus” had contributed to create knowledge to some extent to exercise power over the “Third World” countries (Escobar, 1995). Through my experiences in Latin America, I experienced first hand how the Global South has been fighting (most of the times throughout bottom-up development initiatives and grassroots movements) against these established constructions. Collectives and communities started (de) constructing and (un) learning many of these notions of themselves that were generated in the first place in the Global North. They were claiming to build their own idea of development.

Now that I have been engaging with and learning more about gender practice and academia, it has been fascinating to see how the different gender theories are linked and overlapping with the development ones. But why am I talking about my personal experience and development discourse? What does all of this have to do with gender and discourse? I wanted to connect my ideas about development, gender discourse and my personal experience to deconstruct a gender campaign. During this week I decided to put my critical lenses on and I’ve done formative research. I’ve tried to analyze the GAD approach put in practice in the UN HeForShecampaign and see which gender discourse is associated with it.

The campaign “HeForShe” was launched in September of 2014 and was lead by the UN-Women agency. This viral campaign aimed to mobilize men and boys as principal advocates of change in the fight for gender inequality. This campaign was especially in the spotlight because of Hollywood actress Emma Watson, whose speech extended a “formal invitation” to men to participate in the campaign. The leitmotiv of this campaign
was to “bring together one half of humanity in support of the other half of humanity,” a statement through which the UN campaign left the genderqueer community out of the humanity equation. I believe this campaign illustrates how in the name of gender equity, development agencies, international organizations and in general (often gendered) institutions and structures tend to further ossify a binary notion of gender that not only excludes the diverse range of non-binary identities but also, in doing so, occludes the possibility of their recognition.

I could recognize many characteristics of the GAD approach in this campaign: holistic approach, the rights-based approach and the “explicit integration of man and masculinities” (McIlwaine & Datta, 2003), as my friend Mila already mentioned in her post.

Without undermining the potential of the campaign neither the positive effects that these kinds of campaigns have had in different parts of the world, my point here is about discourse. About who is left out. In this regard, it is very important to re-think heteronormativity (embedded in most development practices, discourse and narratives) and to evaluate the heavy influence that heteronormativity has in most of the feminist approaches that are used in the development field. Many sexual subjectivities are left out within development discourse (and consequently in the development policy framework). There is also an urge to delink heterosexuality from Western traditional gender norms that privilege the globalization of family values vs. other types of social organization (considered as non-normative). In these realm GAD scholars, feminists and development practitioners have a huge task in delinking notions of gender, sex and sexuality in feminist analyses of development.

  

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